The Department of Computer and Information Security at Sejong University is looking for an Assistant Professor, starting in March 2013. Applicants must have a Ph.D. in computer science, computer engineering, or applied mathematics and must have research experiences in one of the followings: computer network and system security, software security, information security or cryptography.

The successful candidate will be responsible for the followings: teaching at least 5 courses a year at both the undergraduate and graduate level, student consulting, research, and other professional services.

Candidates with strong research background in the area of security andcryptography are encouraged to apply.

The Department of Mathematical Sciences at Florida Atlantic University is seeking an Assistant Professor, starting in August 2013 to extend FAU\'s program in cryptology and information security. Florida Atlantic University has been designated a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research by NSA and the Department of Homeland Security. Applicants must possess a Ph.D. in mathematics or in a closely related area and an established research record in cryptology or information security. Responsibilities for this position include teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate level, research, and professional service. A successful candidate is expected to direct research at the graduate level.

The salary range is $60K - $70K. For additional information about the position, please contact us by email at search (at) math.fau.edu. Reviewing of applications will begin on January 15, 2013. The position will remain open until filled.

All applicants must complete the Faculty, Administrative, Managerial & Professional Position Application form available online through the Office of Human Resources at https://jobs.fau.edu. Please upload a letter of application, curriculum vitae, list of publications, and separate teaching and research statements in which you discuss your teaching philosophy and research aspirations.

Implementation attacks pose a serious threat for the security of cryptographic devices and there are a multitude of countermeasures that are used to prevent them. Two countermeasures used in implementations of block ciphers to increase the complexity of such attacks are the use of dummy rounds and redundant computation with consistency checks to prevent fault attacks. In this paper we present several countermeasures based on the idea of infective computation. Our countermeasures ensure that a fault injected into a cipher, dummy, or redundant round will infect the ciphertext such that an attacker cannot derive any information on the secret key being used. This has one clear advantage: the propagation of faults prevents an attacker from being able to conduct any fault analysis on any corrupted ciphertexts. As a consequence, there is no need for any test at the end of an implementation to determine if a fault has been injected and a ciphertext can always be returned.

These are basically the lecture notes for the short course \"Applications of Combinatorics to Information-Theoretic Cryptography\", Central European University, Budapest, May-June 2012. With the objective of covering a full course on secret sharing, additional content will be added in subsequent versions of these lecture notes.

In this paper we present a rather new approach to apply mixed-integer optimization to the cryptanalysis of cryptographic primitives. We focus on the stream cipher Trivium, that has been recommended by the eSTREAM stream cipher project, and the lightweight block cipher Ktantan. Using these examples we explain how the problem of solving a non-linear multivariate Boolean equation system can be formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming problem. Our main focus is the formulation of the mixed-integer programming model (MIP model), which includes amongst others the choice of a conversion method to convert the Boolean equations into equations over the reals, different guessing strategies and the selection of binary variables. We apply the commercial solver Cplex to our problems. The results and further possible features of the approach are discussed.

be broken by the bruteforce-like cryptanalysis, with a time complexity

faster than exhaustive key search by going over the entire key space but performing less than a full encryption for each possible key. Motivated by this observation, we describe a meet-in-the-middle attack that can always be successfully mounted against any practical block ciphers with success probability one. The data complexity of this attack is the smallest according to the unicity distance. The time complexity can be written as $2^k(1-\\epsilon)$ where $\\epsilon > 0$ for all block ciphers. Previously, the security bound that is commonly accepted is the length k of the given master key. From our result we point out that actually this k-bit security is always overestimated and can never be reached due to the inevitable key bits loss. No amount of clever design can prevent it, but increments of the number of rounds can reduce this key loss as much as possible. We give more insight in the problem of the upper bound of eective key bits in block ciphers, and show a more accurate bound. A suggestion about the relation between the key size and block size is given. That is, when the number of rounds is xed, it is better to take a key size equal to the block size. Moreover, eective key bits of many well-known block ciphers are calculated and analyzed, which also conrm their lower security margin than thought before.

We revisit the notions of robustness introduced by Abdalla, Bellare, and Neven (TCC 2010). One of the main motivations for the introduction of strong robustness for public-key encryption (PKE) by Abdalla et al. to prevent certain types of attack on Sako\'s auction protocol. We show, perhaps surprisingly, that Sako\'s protocol is still vulnerable to attacks exploiting robustness problems in the underlying PKE scheme, even when it is instantiated with a \\emph{strongly} robust scheme. This demonstrates that current notions of robustness are insufficient even for one of its most natural applications. To address this and other limitations in existing notions, we introduce a series of new robustness notions for PKE and explore their relationships. In particular, we introduce \\emph{complete} robustness, our strongest new notion of robustness, and give a number of constructions for completely robust PKE schemes.

In [eprint.iacr.org/2009/117] method of virtual isomorphisms of ciphers was proposed for cryptanalysis. Cipher is vulnerable to an attack iff isomorphic cipher is vulnerable to this attack. That method is based on conjugation, and it is not practical because all round operations except one become nonlinear. New isomorphism of AES is proposed, its image IAES has only one nonlinear operation IXOR - isomorphic image of XOR of 5 bytes. Maximal probabilities of byte differentials are increased about 10-11 times, maximal biases of linear sums are increased about 3.6 times comparatively to original AES. IAES possesses computable family of differentials of IXOR with two active input bytes, zero output difference and probability 1. Zero output difference decreases the rate of multiplication of active nonlinearities in differential characteristic of IAES.